As we approach the end of the year, B2B marketers (and lots of other folks) are rolling out predictions for 2015. Much like the past few years, we are seeing a lot of talk about the increased use of analytics in marketing, and a trend toward holding marketers accountable for bottom-line results.

One way for a small company to get noticed is to pick a fight with a well-known firm using the principles of content marketing. What I think of as a giant killer. This blog will show how the little guy, J Carlo Cannel pulled of huge coup by writing a letter to Jim Cramer (big financial influencer) and then getting it covered in the New York Times.

Remember all those late-night conversations you had in college? What if you had a record of all the things you said, all the problems you solved, all the ideas that you couldn’t quite put back together the next morning?

Everyone wants to know what makes a good story. But a novelist is in a very different business than an ad copywriter. Stories in the context of marketing and branding are too brief to use techniques of classic storytelling like narrative arcs and character development. Effective branding stories are told obliquely; they still involve characters with problems to solve, but the narratives that exist are fragmentary and depend on the viewer to complete or even originate them. To coin a term, we could call them “microstories.”